I am a lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications at
Lancaster University in the UK.

Research

I have devoted my career to producing advances in the software
engineering of systems of autonomous social principals such as humans
and organizations. I refer to such systems as sociotechnical systems
(STSs). Autonomy motivates accountability. Accountability motivates
social expectations. If we could base the engineering of STSs on
social expectations, then we could accommodate autonomy and support
accountability. It would provide a principled basis for computing the
trustworthiness of principals. It would bring software engineering
abstractions closer to stakeholder abstractions and lead to more
comprehensible, modular, and reusable systems. Starting from these
motivations, I have developed the idea
of Interaction-Oriented
Software Engineering (IOSE). I have worked extensively on one
form of social expectation, that of social commitment between
principals.

I have also promoted a novel and principled view of social
computing. Social computing, to put it simply, is the
computation of social expectations in STSs. In particular, the
computation is distributed: each principal in an STS computes social
expectations locally based on its own observations. There is no
global store of social expectations. This stands in contrast to the
folk conception of social computing that is conceptually centralized
(think algorithm running on a database) and emphasizes information
analytics. See here for a
brief exposition of my ideas
and here for a formalization of
the distributed computation of commitments.

My research has introduced the following ideas.

The notion of interaction-orientation as distinct from traditional software engineering approaches, all of which are machine-oriented

Social computing as computing social state and social state alignment as interoperability

A practical information-based interpretation of commitments

My current research is focused on building practical languages and
tools to facilitate broader adoption of my work.

My work carries forward a distinguished line of thought originating
in multiagent systems research that emphasizes high-level abstractions
for modeling interactions among autonomous parties (see
here
for a perspective).

Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh.
The thing itself speaks: Accountability as a foundation for
requirements in sociotechnical systems.
In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Requirements
Engineering and Law, page 22. IEEE, 2014.
Full paper accepted but we published only an extended abstract. Full
paper available here.
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